Baseball has a supermarket-on-Saturdays problem. Allow me to explain this daffy analogy.

I don’t go to the supermarket on Saturdays. Sorry—I do go to the supermarket on Saturdays, because I am an idiot. Every time I do, however, I hate myself. It’s too crowded. They’ve run out of all my favorite stuff. The guy giving away astonishingly healthy kale chip samples doesn’t have any more astonishingly healthy kale chip samples. The checkout line is 19 miles long.

In that moment, I say to myself: You’re a moron. You’re never going to the supermarket on a Saturday ever again.

Then some time passes, and I forget, and I go back to the supermarket on a Saturday. And once more, I sob in line at the picked-over cheese counter and say: Why? Whyyy? Whyyyyyy?

This is baseball’s problem with April. In more than a few Major League cities, it’s been too cold for baseball this month. It’s been too cold for snowmobile races. It’s been too cold to ice fish.

The point is, in a bunch of fine baseball towns, April baseball has been uncomfortable to play, uncomfortable to watch. It isn’t that it’s impossible to play, it isn’t that April can’t be warm, even nice, it’s just…dodgy.

With 25 weather postponements through Wednesday, the game is on pace to break its record for weather-related April scratches. In Chicago this season, they had to cancel both a White Sox and a Cubs game for snow. Same with the Yankees and Mets in New York. A Kansas City Royals game got canceled for bone-chilling cold. The Twins postponed three games in a row.

Even if the games happen, nobody’s that thrilled. It snowed during the Pirates game the other night. I saw a photo of a Tigers game where I think there were more humans in the dugout than in the stands. It looked like, you know, a Marlins game.

Sorry, Marlins fans.

This isn’t football, where people will suck up freezing temperatures for a few hours on a Sunday, because it’s football—and also because someone has a flask of bourbon. It isn’t baseball’s postseason, where fans will suck up freezing temperatures because their team is making a run at the World Series—and also because someone has a flask of bourbon.

We like to rationalize and say the weather has been unusually cold this month, and that’s true, especially in the Midwest. But a warm game is better product. A study of 22,215 baseball games from 2000 to 2011 by University of Nevada academics found that offensive production goes up significantly in warm weather.

You know what goes up in cold weather?

Walks! Every baseball fan loves walks. Ugh.

Nobody can deny this: Baseball on a 75-degree day is about 5,000 times more fun than baseball on a 40-degree day.

That’s not an opinion, folks, that’s analytics.

Yet you and I know what will happen next: The weather will warm into baseball weather, and all that early season frustration will fade. We turn the page. We forget the misery of early, raw April.

And then we do it all again the next year. It’s crazy. It’s crazier than the supermarket on Saturdays.

Minnesota Twins relief pitcher Fernando Rodney stands on the mound in the ninth inning of a game against the Pirates in Pittsburgh on April 4.
Photo:
Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

The good news is that people are speaking up about this. The other day, the Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo came out and said the Thing That’s Not Supposed to be Said in Baseball.

He said that baseball should cut games.

“I think we play too much baseball,” Rizzo said on ESPN radio. He said “playing in the cold sucks.”

“When you think about the Cubs and Cardinals, you think of a beautiful Sunday at Wrigley Field. You don’t think about playing in 20 degrees.”

In baseball, this talk has been heretical.

It’s been heresy because baseball is a game of traditions and records—and messing with those traditions and records is a bad for the sport.

Just kidding! It’s about money.

It’s assumed that fewer games will mean less money for teams—and therefore, less money for players. Cut back on games, and you’re potentially cutting back on attendance, merch, and—most important—the ability to shake down cable television executives for long-term programming contracts.

Have you met a cable television executive in 2018? You could tell them you started a Hamster Wrestling League (HWL) in your backyard, and they might buy it for $100 million. Maybe $200 million, if you could promise four hamster wrestling matches a week.

Baseball has alternatives—maybe the cold weather teams can play in the warm weather cities in April, then migrate northward like geese when it thaws.

I’m not sure about that. Cuts sure seem a cleaner way of doing it. Let’s lop off 10 games. Twenty!

Rizzo takes a holistic view.

“Yes, guys are going to take pay cuts. But are we playing this game for the money or do we love this game? I know it’s both, but in the long run, it will make everything better.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you guys hearing what I’m hearing?

IT’S THE “SOMEBODY IN SPORTS IS MAKING SENSE” SIREN. WOOOOO-WOOOOO-WOOOOO.

Be careful: the next thing you know, Rizzo is going to be saying the World Cup shouldn’t be sold to the highest bidder, and the Olympics should be rotated among a small list of cities. He’s going to say championship games shouldn’t start after 9 p.m. Eastern.